A Black Man Walking for Oil and Gas

©2025 T. Agnew-craiyon.com

As 75% of the Heart of Atlanta Motel’s clientele came from out of state, and it was strategically located near Interstate 75 and 85 as well as two major U.S. highways, the Court found that the business clearly affected interstate commerce. The Court concluded that places of public accommodation had no “right” to select guests as they saw fit, free from governmental regulation. — Tarlton Law Library

Interstate 75 slices through a landscape buried in America’s tumultuous past, tracing routes once shaped by slavery, then later, by the fight for civil rights.

Long before the highway existed, the Western and Atlantic Railroad ran along a similar path — serving as a lifeline for the Confederacy during the Civil War by transporting soldiers and supplies across the South.

Decades later, just steps from where I-75 and I-85 meet, the Heart of Atlanta Motel stood at the center of a historic legal battle. 

Its refusal to serve Black patrons led to a landmark Supreme Court case that upheld the Civil Rights Act and reshaped public access across the interstate system— including along I-75.

This corridor, once tied to division, became a symbol of progress and federal enforcement of equality. Yet, that history clings like a ghost to its gnarled steel rebar and asphalt. 

That symbol of progress and federal support is now buried in history with no hope of it in the current administration, yet we must hope.

On a recent visit to Florida’s west coast, I drove my rental car south on Interstate 75 from Tampa International Airport. It was warm — way above the seasonal norms for April — and my air conditioning cranked on high.

As usual, it was incredibly muggy. The walk to the rental car garage soaked my shirt, reminding me how glad I was not to live in this swampy state.

Stretching from the northern tip of Michigan at the Canadian border to the vibrant streets of Miami, Interstate 75 snakes through eight states — beginning in Sault Ste. Marie, winding south through Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and finally into Florida.

It’s a boring route going south — the roadway hedged with green palmettos and southern pines. Sprawling minarets of RF towers screech to the sky, filled with large osprey nests exploding from the top in a disorganised matrix of tree branches and leaves.

The eternal construction makes I-75 tedious and incredibly dangerous. It’s a major thoroughfare for large semis headed to the ports of Miami, and it’s easy to get pinched between two of them when you’re trying not to exit (Florida’s Turnpike, State Road 91 leading to Jacksonville is an infamous example).

Just outside of Sarasota, I noticed a young black man walking on the opposite side of the interstate. Wearing a casual suit and carrying a red gas can, he walked sluggishly, his chin to his chest. It was hot.

With the new roadway, there were now eight lanes between my car and him, as I was in the south lane and he was heading north.

Further south, I saw a red car stalled on the same side as the man, its hazards flashing and the hood open. I calculated at least two miles between him and his car. 

He’d been walking in this heat for hours. I took the next exit to do a loop back north.

I saw his shadowed form blink through the heat sifting off the asphalt. Traffic raged as I slowed — stopping on the median of 75 is never safe, but I crept up behind him and pulled over in front.

When he approached my window, I lowered it and he leaned in.

“Need gas?” I asked.

His worn face encased in sweat, he wiped his forearm across it.

“I actually need oil and gas. It’s been a day.”

He studied me apprehensively, looking at the inside of my car to make certain there were no shovels or trash bags.

“Hop in. There is a Quick Stop right off this exit.” He would have had to cross five lanes of insane traffic to reach the store.

When he got into my car, he told me his car overheated, but he was clearly having a tough day. His phone was dead.

“I appreciate it,” he said.

I waited in the car while he bought gas and oil and a Coke.

As we drove the two miles back to his car, he seldom spoke. He was quiet, but managed a few words.

“Man, my girlfriend told me to get oil, but I didn’t listen.” He smiled and glanced sideways at me. “We’re getting married in six months if she doesn’t throw me away before then.”

“You better start listening, then,” I said.

We sat in silence as we got closer to the exit where his car waited. 

Finally he said, “Why did you stop?”

“I saw a guy walking in this heat.”

He didn’t say anything for a beat, and I could sense he was thinking.

When we pulled off the shoulder behind his car, he grabbed his bag of oil and his coke. He sat there for a moment, looking straight ahead as the cars whizzed by, the velocity of the wind shaking my car. 

He glanced at me and nodded his head. “You made my day, man,” he said.

I nodded and asked if he needed help with his car.

“I got it.”

What he didn’t say was that a white man had stopped to help an African American walking along a highway. That in south Florida — especially cities like Sarasota, Palm Beach, and Naples — segregation is alive and well.

The logical human equation doesn’t serve anyone, white or black, walking along an interstate on a simmering day. People are busy and preoccupied and driving north for work or south for vacation or just to drive. 

People are traveling at seventy miles per hour talking on their phones, tending to their kids in the backseat, trying to get somewhere on time and alive. People are dealing with divorce, a death in the family, or financial hardship.

People are hurting and aloof in the stream of life that never stops. And there are risks to picking up a stranger — I certainly wouldn’t expect a woman to stop to pick up a man along an interstate.

Yet, it’s disturbing that hundreds of vehicles passed him traveling north, the same way he was walking. He was a black man dressed in casual clothes. What if he were white? What if he wore a tie?

In the 1960s, five hundred miles north at the junction of I-75 and I-85, the Heart of Atlanta Motel, a spacious, 216-room motel, refused rooms to black patrons using the interstate for commerce.

It didn’t matter that they drove the interstate to make a living like every other American. It was just a black man walking along an interstate.

On the drive to my hotel that day, after watching the young man close his hood and merge into the frenetic pulse of I-75, I saw a mother osprey with a large fish in her beak circle an RF tower and land in her nest. Wiry tendrils of branches cascaded through the concrete canopy of I-75.